Outsiders struggle to find way

Any Nova Scotian over the age of 35 likely remembers that dark period in the 1980s when news broke of the sexual and physical assaults on children in the infamous Goler clan from the South Mountain in the Annapolis Valley.

Montreal-born author Lauren B. Davis remembers, and she wasn’t even living here at the time. She had heard rumours of the activity when she lived here in the 1970s, but passed it off as being unlikely if no one was doing anything about it.

But too many people were looking the other way — viewing the clan as a whole as other people. Davis had been pondering "that whole" concept of polarization when the idea for her latest novel, Our Daily Bread, took shape.

The novel opens with Albert, a 21-year-old member of the mountain-dwelling Erskine clan, already polarized from his family in that he is well-read, living in his own shack, and not wanting to get involved in his uncles’ most recent drug venture.

The clan itself is considered as "others" by people living in the nearby town of Gideon, at the base of the mountain.

In town one day, Albert meets up with and befriends Bobby, the 15-year-old, awkward son in a family of four who are suffering any number of polarizations among themselves and others in the town.

Bobby shuns his family, his younger, smarter sister Ivy is set upon by bullies, his mother feels like an outsider in the town and his father worries the couple is like "others" because they are not married in the God-fearing town.

Even when Ivy befriends a kindly storekeeper, the woman herself is seen as different because she is not caught up in the hype of the town’s church.

Along the way new differences are found, old ones forgotten, and alliances are formed, all leading to a final realignment of some polar relationships and the closing of the gulfs between others.

In an interview, Davis said there are endless possible divides in a community, caused by religion, economic circumstances, race, gender, conflicts over land or behaviour, and even personal slights.

"I wanted to encourage people to ask themselves who might be considered ‘other’ in their own communities, and what they were willing to do to perhaps cross that divide," she said.

While the Erskines are the most obvious polarized group in the book, not much of the novel actually takes place in their compound after the opening.

"I didn’t want the reader to spend the entire novel gawking at the horrors on mountain life," she said. "I felt that was simply too exploitive and salacious. What we see in the opening of the novel resonates, I hope, through the rest of the text, even when the focus is on the townspeople."

She said it’s an easy thing for people to find some person or group and call them outsiders for whatever reason, "but sometimes we do the most damage closer to home. Sometimes the people we relegate to society’s hinterland are our family members, our classmates and our neighbours."

While there are plenty of figures in the book dealing with their own polarization, Davis finds Albert the most tragic of all.

"He’s held back from what he desires not only by the external conflicts of his appalling relations, the weight of family history and society’s expectations but also because he has been so damaged, so broken, by what’s happened to him," she said.

"He has, in many ways, accepted society’s judgment, and doesn’t really believe he could ever break free of it. Still, he tries so hard, in his way."

But Bobby and Ivy’s mother cuts her own tragic figure, Davis says.

"She has so little understanding of herself. I think many of us have, alas, known people like this: restless, irritable and discontent, always looking for the next bright shiny thing.

"You think, ‘Good Lord, doesn’t she know how good she has it? Will nothing every make her happy?’ Watching a person like that self-destruct is heartbreaking."

Davis said Ivy’s character is based on some of her own experiences as a nine-year-old with a family affected by mental health and alcohol issues. She hung around a store owned by a woman, and the store became her own refuge.

She said the storekeeper character is based on a combination of several women she has known, but is "true to my memory of the woman I knew who owned the antique store. She was a haven and sanctuary and a lifesaver."

She researched the Goler trials for her book, but said it was awful to be writing about that type of activity.

"What went on up there (on the South Mountain) was ghastly in the extreme. . . . I chose not to include some of what I learned during my research, simply because it was too hideous for fiction, too gag-inducing," she said.

"I didn’t want to write a book that either exploited the victims, or was too salacious. I did, however, use some of the court testimony verbatim in the final chapter. I had nightmares and shed tears, I can tell you that."

She said the character of Albert is the most intriguing to her, and the one she most worried about never making it into print as the rejection letters piled up.

"When it looked as though this book might not get published . . . it was Albert’s ‘non-life’ I grieved the most," she said. "There’s something about a person struggling against such great odds, with so little help, that just pierces me."